The Observer
June 23, 2002
By Gaby Wood
Killing Me Softly, the book by Nicci French on which Chen Kaige's first English-language film is based, is a thriller about a woman in a long-term relationship who meets a stranger in the street and falls first in lust and then in love with him. It's about the passion and tenderness in violence, about what you have to lose, and about living with simultaneous and opposite certainties.
The film, on the other hand, is about a woman (Heather Graham) who leaves one bore and falls for another. The second of these (Joseph Fiennes, a one-trick actor playing Shakespeare again) is not a rootless hero as in the book, but an eligible bachelor who might be found in the pages of Tatler, and who, when required to chase a criminal, breaks into a running style he could only have been taught by a mechanical monkey on speed. Together, the pair have sex so 'passionate' that the continuity person failed to notice Graham's bra going back on halfway to climax.
Kaige has ruined the story by adding a ludicrous twist, but more importantly, he has misunderstood Killing Me Softly's original plot, which rests not on a mechanical unfurling of events but on the gut reactions of a heroine with heightened emotions. Without the spark, the sexiness or the danger, there is barely a trace of the book's purpose.
The Guardian
23 June, 2002
Xan Brooks on film
Loth though I am to dismiss the medium I love, and which provides me with a living (of sorts), the question has to be asked. Does anybody seriously care about film this Friday? Surely it's the other F-word that's on everyone's lips at present. On the way into work I saw a set of St George flags plastered over a big Spider-Man poster. Somehow that seemed fitting.
It was the World Cup, after all, which was blamed for scuppering what might otherwise have been a record-breaking opening weekend for Sam Raimi's enjoyable Spider-Man. And it's the World Cup, too, that's responsible for the current glut of chick-flicks cluttering up the release schedules and lending an amorphous, Stepford Wife quality to Britain's cinemas.
Is it just me, or are even the titles starting to blur? I'm betting that many punters will set out to see Kissing Jessica Stein this weekend only to stumble into Killing Me Softly instead. If so, the more fool them. Because while the former is a sparky, enjoyable romantic-comedy, the latter is the worst film I've seen this year by a country mile: a mesmerisingly dreadful would-be erotic thriller that had the audience I saw it with hooting with derision. Set in London (and embarrassingly awash with Guardian product placement), the film finds Heather Graham being bewitched, bothered and bewildered by a ludicrous Heathcliffe figure played by Joseph Fiennes. Graham's performance is suggestive of some grotesque Aunt Sally sex doll (all vacant eyes, rouged cheeks and jiggling breasts). Meanwhile, Fiennes affects a permanent smirking glower that looks as though it's been lifted wholesale from a Mills and Boon dust-jacket.
Bona-fide film turkeys are rarer than you'd think. But in Killing Me Softly we have a picture to set alongside Showgirls, Mad Cows and Battlefield Earth in the all-time cinema hall of shame. Right now, I can't recommend it enough. It's the perfect movie for an England reeling from a match of bungled missed opportunities and moments of unintentional low comedy. Cometh the hour, cometh the film.
